Saturday, April 09, 2011

The Woes of an AD/HD Author

This is an unfinished short story, inspired by this incident, that I'll probably never finish. I just didn't like where it was going, so I abandoned it. I thought this one, this one, and this one came out good, so I'll just go ahead and give you what I got. Enjoy!

It was New Year's Eve in Chicago again, and Gabriel was alone, again, just as he had been the previous three years. It's not that he didn't date; it's that he didn't like anyone. He had spent the evening with friends of friends rather than actual friends, and he thought he could get his mind to a happier place through dry martinis and pills that an acquaintance named Sophia, who dressed and acted like Stevie Nicks, kept popping out of her purse. It had worked for a number of hours, actually, but now he was at a point where the combination of pills and gin that was probably out of a plastic bottle created the perfect formula to make a man hate everything that moved; or maybe he would have been feeling that way completely naturally.

He decided to just go home to spin records alone, getting drunk off a bottle of Grey Goose that he had in his freezer, knowing that dropping that needle on the record, making that static noise, combined with his other favorite noise, the ice cubes clinking around the tumbler glass of Goose, were sure to make him feel comfortable. Not happy but comfortable. However, this level of comfort would not come easy, as getting a cab at this time of night in Chicago on New Year's Eve is next to impossible, and it was cold and windy as anything that night.

Just when he was ready to go back into the warm bar to knock down Irish car bombs until he didn't have to have conscious thoughts anymore, a cab approached, but just as he ducked in, someone darted in through the opposite door. It was a woman in her twenties with long red hair, big brown eyes, dressed in a stylish overcoat, and she was absolutely beautiful. But none of that mattered because this was his cab; not hers.

She just glared at him so he spoke first. "I hope to God you're going north or this is going to get really complicated," he said.

"I'm going south, as a matter of fact, but it's not at all complicated. This is my cab."

Outraged, Gabriel countered, "How do you figure? The cab pulled up on my side of the street! You can't run across the street and snake it like that. But listen, neither one of us is going to get another cab if one of us gives this one up, so I'll just ride south with you, even if you're a little evil, and then ride back solo. Where you going?"

3 comments:

I love that when I read your stories I can picture the whole thing as if it were right in front of me. I have said this before, but I really think you are a talented writer.

This one is really good, but I have to tell you that the Jackson and Maya one was my favorite. I was watching my daughter at volleyball the other day and there was a boy in skinny jeans and I thought of your story. Something about your writing, not just this story, sticks in my head and makes me wonder what ever happened.